Brevo vs Freshsales

Brevo, known as Sendinblue until its 2023 rebrand, is a French marketing and sales platform founded in Paris in 2012. It started with email marketing and transactional email and now covers SMS, WhatsApp campaigns, marketing automation, a sales CRM, live chat and landing pages, with a focus on small and mid-sized businesses.

Its pricing model is the main differentiator: marketing plans are based mainly on the volume of emails sent rather than the number of stored contacts, so companies with large but infrequently emailed lists pay much less than with contact-based tools. The free plan stores a large contact list but caps sending at 300 emails per day and adds Brevo branding. Starter removes the daily limit, Business adds marketing automation, A/B testing, send-time optimization and phone support, and Enterprise adds dedicated IPs, SSO, sub-accounts and service levels. Transactional email and SMS are also available through APIs, often used by developers for password resets and order notifications.

Brevo suits European SMBs, e-commerce stores and startups that want email, SMS and a light CRM in one place at a reasonable price, with GDPR-native data handling. Its template editor and automation builder are capable but less refined than the leaders. Mailchimp is more polished but costlier as lists grow, Klaviyo is stronger for Shopify-focused e-commerce, MailerLite is simpler and cheaper for newsletters, and ActiveCampaign offers deeper automation. For transactional email alone, Postmark or Amazon SES are more specialized.

Freshsales is the sales CRM from Freshworks, the company founded in Chennai, India in 2010 as Freshdesk, now headquartered in San Mateo, California and listed on Nasdaq since 2021. It gives sales teams contact and account records, visual deal pipelines and built-in channels for email, phone and chat, so reps can work leads without bolting on separate tools.

The Growth plan covers kanban pipelines, lifecycle stages, email templates, built-in calling and basic workflows. Pro adds contact scoring, deal insights from Freddy AI, sales sequences, custom sales activities and territory management. Enterprise adds forecasting insights, custom modules, field-level permissions, a sandbox and audit logs. A Freddy AI Agent add-on for customer-facing bots is billed per 100 sessions, and Freshsales Suite bundles the CRM with Freshmarketer for marketing automation.

Freshsales fits small and mid-size sales teams that want more out of the box than Pipedrive at a similar per-seat price, especially companies already using Freshdesk for support. HubSpot has a stronger marketing ecosystem and free CRM, Zoho CRM is deeper to customize, and Salesforce remains the choice for complex enterprise processes. Close is a lighter alternative for call-heavy inside sales.

Buying tip: the pricing page now lists only paid plans with a 21-day free trial; older reviews mention a free plan that is no longer offered there. Displayed prices assume annual billing: Growth is $9 per user billed annually versus $11 month to month. Freshworks accepts Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express.